The tomb Lady Margaret’s executors commissioned in Westminster Abbey looks oddly austere today. But it is among the most convincingly human of the Abbey’s monuments, albeit that of a woman who in life tended to command either pity or respect rather than sympathy. The hands of the bronze-gilt figure are those old, arthritis-ridden ones that John Fisher described, and old too are the deep brackets around the mouth. The sculptor was the quarrelsome Italian Pietro Torrigiano, the man who broke Michelangelo’s nose, and for a fee of 20 shillings Erasmus composed the inscription around the ledge.
Margaret’s head rests on a cushion, at her feet (so the contract for the carving stated) ‘a beast called a Yale’. The arms around the base of the tomb are those she shared with her first husband, Edmund Tudor; those of her son Henry VII and his queen; of her dead grandson Arthur; of her grandson Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon; of her parents and grandparents; those she shared with her last husband, Stanley; those of Henry V and Katherine of Valois, even; but no visible sign of her second husband, Stafford, happy though her life with him seems to have been. He was commemorated in the masses she had ordered to be said for him at the Abbey – but the tomb was about the dynasty.
This tomb and its companion were not finished until well into Henry VIII’s reign. The contract for the figure on Margaret’s tomb was only drawn up on 23 November 1511, and her executors’ accounts record: ‘First paid the 27th day of December in the 4th year of the reign of King Henry VIII to M. Garter the king of heralds for making and declaring my lady’s arms in viii ‘scochyns’ [escutcheons] for my lady’s tomb, and delivered to the Florentine: 8s 4d.’ It was probably his figure of Margaret which won Torrigiano the commission to sculpt the figures for the more important royal tomb – that of Henry and Elizabeth – which is one of the glories of Westminster Abbey. The figures lie side by side in unemotional gilt splendour, on a plinth of Italian marble. They are gazing upwards to God, and God sees them clearly: two gold images, almost sanctified by their beauty. Static and stationary, in their tranquillity they emphasise the message of the Henry VII Chapel that the Tudors were here to stay.
Above the tomb of Henry and Elizabeth are the Beaufort portcullis, the Tudor rose and, the French fleur de lis. Leland called the chapel ‘miraculum orbis universali’, the wonder of the entire world: not only for its myriad carvings – the saints in their ranks, the beasts of heraldry – and its stained glass, now long lost, but for the soaring arches of the roof. It was the last great gasp of Perpendicular Gothic, built just as a new world was coming into being. Henry VII’s dream of seeing Henry VI canonised and ‘translated’ here had never become reality, but both he and Margaret Beaufort had poured money into the project – some £20,000, equivalent to about £7 million today.
Elizabeth lies with eyes open and hands folded in prayer, wearing a fur-lined robe and with her feet resting on a royal lion. Torrigiano can never have seen Elizabeth of York – the image was only completed fifteen years after her death – so this may be either a standardised royal image or one guided by her effigy. The result has been called the finest Renaissance tomb north of the Alps, with gilded putti and curling foliage jostling the greyhound and the Tudor dragon. But the point – the point of the whole chapel – is the dynasty.
In the south aisle of the chapel are three free-standing tombs. With Margaret Beaufort lie two of her descendants: her great-great-granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots; and her great-granddaughter Margaret Lennox, the mother of Mary’s husband Lord Darnley. It is a distinctly crowded setting, given the quantity of white marble beneath which the Scots queen was reinterred in the seventeenth century. In the north aisle are two more of Margaret Beaufort’s great-granddaughters, the two English ruling queens Elizabeth and Mary. Since Henry VIII lies at Windsor – with Edward VI merely placed beneath the altar in Henry VII’s chapel – this has wound up being a monument not only to the Tudors as such, but to the distaff side of history: a ‘Lady’ Chapel in honour, appropriately, of the Virgin Mary.
None of the other women in this story has a tomb as visible as these in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth Woodville, interred with so little ceremony, at least got to share, almost unnoticed, her husband’s tomb at Windsor. Anne Neville is known to be buried in Westminster Abbey, but the site is not recorded. And though Cecily Neville is buried as she planned at Fotheringhay, the place never became what she had intended, a memorial to the Yorkist dynasty; indeed, by Elizabeth I’s day the tombs had fallen into such disrepair that she ordered to be them tidied away. Even Margaret of Burgundy’s tomb in Malines was ransacked in the sixteenth century – by local iconoclasts, Spanish troops or English mercenaries – and today no trace of any memorial remains. Margaret of Anjou was buried as she requested with her parents at Angers – evidence that the war in the country which should have been her marital home had not gone her way.
Everything that is known about these women suggests that their main imperative was dynastic – genetic. And the blood of Elizabeth Plantagenet and Henry Tudor – and therefore the blood of Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth Woodville and Cecily Neville – still runs in Britain’s royal family. This legacy would surely outweigh whatever personal price they had to pay. Amongst the women of this Cousins’ War, Margaret Beaufort fought hardest and most successfully for her bloodline. She is also the only one to leave another sort of legacy – a legacy of works.1
The links between these women and their descendants would continue long after they were dead. The deadly dispute between cousins continued for the next century, with its contests mostly fought away from the battlefield, in arenas where women could compete more visibly. Elizabeth of York’s granddaughter ‘Bloody’ Mary would dispute the throne with her kinswoman Jane Grey (descended from Elizabeth’s younger daughter Mary); Elizabeth Tudor would be forced to execute the Queen of Scots, descended from Elizabeth of York’s elder daughter Margaret. But out of their combined experience, out of the different models of female agency they embodied, would be born something more productive.
England’s consort queens, from the Conquest to the Tudors, demonstrate a gradual move towards mere domesticity2 – from the time when a strong woman ‘will be counted among the men who sit at God’s table’ to one when any sign of such ‘manful’ strength was a source of profound unease. And yet, in the century ahead, the idea of the strong woman (something then seen almost as a third sex) was about to reach its apogee. Elizabeth I, perhaps the country’s greatest monarch, played upon all the ambiguities of gender, not least in her famous speech at Tilbury. She reconciled, at least for her own lifetime, the problem with which Marguerite of Anjou had grappled in vain: that of reconciling the requirements of rule and the pressure to be ‘womanly’.
That later Elizabeth, of course, was a woman whose undoubted contribution was neither genetic nor dynastic. That has been, to all women since, her lasting legacy. If Elizabeth of York was Elizabeth I’s physical progenitor, then perhaps she could trace back to Marguerite a different kind of ancestry. Perhaps, even – however cruelly the wars had told upon her – that fact gives to Marguerite, too, a share in the ultimate victory.